Author: Alexander Boot

We ought to be proud of our future king. For Prince William has just received a unique honour that none of his dynastic predecessors could boast.

Yes, other monarchs and heirs to the throne have won accolades, but those were more or less much of a muchness.

For example, Alfred the Great successfully defended the country against the Vikings – but then George VI successfully led the Commonwealth in the war against the Nazis (Prince William’s great-great-uncle David supported the other side, it has to be said). Henry V showed the French what’s what at Agincourt – but then George III did the same at Waterloo, if not exactly in a hands-on fashion. Elizabeth I found a workable religious settlement – but then so did William III (workable doesn’t mean perfect, but an achievement none the less).

Yet none of them – and I invite you to peruse history books trying to prove me wrong – managed to reach the dizzying heights of achievement scaled by HRH Prince William.

For we can both laud and applaud the prince for having merited a most precious accolade. Last Friday he was named “straight ally of the year” at the British LGBT Awards.

HRH received the award with the dignity for which his family is so justly famous. “Nobody should be bullied for their sexuality,” he said.

Yes, of course he knows, after the sterling education he received, that ‘nobody’ is a singular antecedent calling for the singular personal pronoun ‘his’. But, having established his credentials as a homophile, he wasn’t about to earn demerit points for using the forbidden ‘h’ word.

Also receiving an award was Caitlin ‘Bruce’ Jenner, living proof that the bullying that vexes William so is very much rife. Just the other day she/he was addressing a crowd when a lout yelled “Get your d*** out, Bruce!” Someone has to take a stand against such troglodytes, the way Alfred stood up against the Vikings or George VI against the Nazis.

“It’s so important to be proud of the person you are,” added the prince and, though I agree wholeheartedly (he’s my future king after all), I do wish the statement had been qualified ever so slightly.

Not everyone should be proud of the person he is – sorry, mea culpa, I mean they are. Some people, for example, are violent. Some are kleptomaniacs. Some are drug addicts. Some think Jeremy Corbyn would be brill as prime minister. Should they all be proud? Words should be used with precision, Your Royal Highness, or not at all.

The Prince then expanded his statement: “It is 2017, and nobody should be bullied for their sexuality, or for any other reason.” I’d suggest that a bit of bullying wouldn’t be out of place with some of the categories mentioned above, but HRH is entitled to his own view. Especially since his statement reveals the keen sense of history he boasts.

It is indeed 2017, as opposed to 1017, 1917 or indeed 2016, and the difference isn’t merely chronological.

For 2017 has ushered in a new morality that hitherto was beyond mankind’s – sorry, I mean personkind’s reach. Until 2017 it was perfectly acceptable to bully somebody for his – sorry, I mean their sexuality, or for any other reason. But 2017 has opened up a whole new perspective on such matters, and we must all thank Prince William for having pointed it out.

This is in no way to cast doubt on a man’s right to feel proud about having sex with other men. Seeking recognition for preferring rectal intercourse is perfectly legitimate, although few heterosexuals I know are proud of the way they choose to express their sexual cravings.

Some of them are prideful men, committing thereby the seventh deadly sin. Some are even proud of the number of women they’ve bedded, even though most exaggerate their record mendaciously. But no one I know is proud of being straight qua straight. Perhaps we should be, now that we’ve received a royal dispensation.

“In recent years I’ve become passionate about what we can do to protect people from bullying, particularly online,” added the Prince, with the sensitivity we’ve learned to expect from our younger royals.

This ought to be welcomed, for the realm has few more pressing concerns than stamping out harangues about Caitlin Jenner’s genitalia. After all, none of the monarchs I’ve mentioned ever got around to protecting the LGBT community from abuse.

I bet they didn’t even know the term LGBT, nor realised that people describable by those initials formed a community. This, though some of them could have qualified for membership.

Springing to mind are William Rufus, Richard I (some Lionheart!), Edward II, Richard II and James I (the jury’s still out on Charles I and Queen Anne). Yet even they neglected to protect the LGBT community, instead devoting their energy to the less pressing need of protecting the realm.

That oversight has now been corrected thanks to HRH Prince William. He and his brother are doing all they can to remind us that we’re indeed 17 years into the twenty-first century, which is so much more sensitive and moral than the previous 20.

Congratulations, Your Royal Highness! It’s comforting to know that the future of the dynasty is in safe hands. I’m sure your grandparents are proud of you.

If you wish to contest this irrefutable charge, allow me to guide you through a simple logical process even you could understand:

Man is just an animal.

He may be marginally smarter than other animals, but that’s only a difference of degree.

Therefore a cow is no less of a moral agent than man.

Hence no moral difference exists between killing a person or a cow.

Laws stipulate that aiding and abetting a crime is tantamount to perpetrating it.

Therefore anyone who aids and abets the killing of a cow is as guilty as anyone who aids and abets any old murder.

Eating the flesh of a murdered animal undoubtedly constitutes aiding and abetting murder: if nobody ate meat, animals wouldn’t be slaughtered.

Therefore every time you tuck into a boeuf Bourguignon, you brand yourself as a murderer.

Since over a lifetime you’ve consumed many animals, you’re not just a murderer, but a mass one at that.

The only way for you to redeem yourself is to become a vegetarian, if you aren’t one already. Ergo, since at least 95 per cent of my readers are carnivores, it’s a safe assumption that you’re a mass murderer.

Now either you accept the validity of this logical structure or you agree that the professional atheist Richard Dawkins is an idiot. For the above is exactly what he’s saying, albeit not in the same strict logical sequence (he’s incapable of sequential thought).

And verbatim? “When I pass one of those lorries with little slats and see fearful eyes peering out, I think of the railway wagons to Auschwitz.”

That’s supposed to move Richard to a higher moral plateau than the one occupied by you and me, Nazi murderers for whom the same sight only means boeuf Bourguignon.

Even as Auschwitz was inspired by an ideology of racial superiority, so is meat eating inspired by what Dawkins (and those who are similarly deficient intellectually) describes as ‘specieism’, the belief that man is qualitatively superior to any other species.

This, believes Dawkins, will one day be viewed with the same revulsion as racism: “We put humanity on a pedestal miles higher than the surrounding territory. A human foetus that has approximately the anatomy and brainpower of a worm is accorded more status than an adult chimpanzee.”

That Richard Dawkins is no great mind should be instantly obvious to any intelligent person. So obvious, in fact, that it’s hardly worth talking about. I’m only quoting that deranged drivel to show the depth of the intellectual abyss into which an atheist inevitably falls.

Even Dawkins has enough brain power to realise that – speaking in strictly secular terms – the principal difference between a human foetus and a worm or a chimpanzee is the dynamic potential. Man is the only part of the biological world (I was about to say God’s Creation, but stopped myself just in time) whose lifespan isn’t determined by his chemical, physical or biological makeup.

Thus a worm will remain the same worm as long as it lives. However, something that starts life with “approximately the anatomy and brainpower of a worm” will develop into a human being, even if only one as flawed as Richard Dawkins.

A worm or even an adult chimpanzee won’t be able to explain, not even in Dawkins’s asinine way, why man is no different from them. A human being may arrive at such thoughts at age five, though most, with a few notable exceptions, leave them behind by the time they grow up.

In that sense a worm or an ape is much closer to vegetables or minerals than to man. Their lives are predetermined at birth, whereas man’s conscious choices can direct his life into an endless variety of conduits.

For example, Dawkins could have chosen to read things like philosophy, theology and logic, which might have helped to turn him into an intelligent person, or at least not one manifestly stupid. Instead he chose to make millions writing strident atheistic gibberish that lamentably appeals to our comprehensively educated masses.

Had he taken a different path, he could have learned not to ignore facts that contradict his ideological bias. And had he been able to walk up another couple of intellectual steps, he might even have realised that atheism, especially if taken to its logical conclusion, is an intellectual death trap.

Refusing to see the qualitative difference between man and worms naturally flows out of atheism, and Dawkins is foolishly consistent here (Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”). Equally consistent is his sermon of vegetarianism, and his woolly arguments in its favour.

In our anthropocentric civilisation, killing animals doesn’t constitute murder, as Dawkins claims. In fact, the Western position on carnivorism was manifestly laid down in Genesis: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

We no longer follow Biblical prescriptions, but they’ve seeped into the genetic make-up of our civilisation. Therefore even those unaware of the scriptural origin of their everyday practices unwittingly follow them every day.

Ideological vegetarians don’t, not this practice anyway, thereby implicitly denying the spiritual provenance of our civilisation. Intellectually, they’re as anomic as they are anaemic.

Dawkins, who illogically hates God who, according to him, doesn’t exist, practices anomie explicitly and stridently. His turgid musings prove yet again, if further proof is needed, that any intellectual process starting from a false premise will end up like a house built on a termite-ridden foundation – so much rubbish strewn about.

 

I arrived in the US at the height of Watergate, a week or so after Nixon had sacked Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was investigating the break-in. I remember watching the president assuring the people he was “not a crook”.

Manhattan was awash with posters and bumper stickers attacking Nixon from every conceivable angle, including from behind. One caricature showed the president being raped by a fellow prison inmate, with the caption saying “Justice at last”.

But it was one bumper sticker that caught my eye, making me feel smug. It said “Impeach the Cox sacker”, and I was proud of myself for being sufficiently au courant with idiomatic English to understand the naughty pun.

I’m reminded of my youth by the current brouhaha involving another president, Donald Trump. The parallel, I hasten to add, has occurred not just to me but to just about every commentator. It’s that obvious.

For President Trump has just sacked FBI Director James Comey, who was investigating the more than intimate links between Trump’s associates and Putin’s junta.

Trump immediately stated that he himself wasn’t under investigation, but that sounded like a cop-out. Few people would believe that his closest advisers got in bed with Putin without Trump’s authorisation. His own business links with Putin’s government, which is to say organised crime, also merit more scrutiny than they have so far received.

There’s also another similarity between Nixon and Trump: the predominantly left-wing US media hate both regardless of any wrongdoing.

Nixon found himself on the receiving end of journalistic venom in 1948 when, as a young congressman, he interrogated the Soviet spy Alger Hiss on behalf of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). Nixon nailed Hiss to the wall, guaranteeing himself the enduring enmity of the press.

Many commentators were sure then that sooner or later the press would get Nixon, and so it eventually proved. This isn’t to suggest he did nothing wrong – what he did was illegal, no question about that.

But the press might have been less self-righteous had a similar indiscretion been committed by, say, one of the Kennedy brothers. In all likelihood the hacks would have sat on the story, as they sat for years on every story documenting JFK’s philandering or his closeness to some Mafia chieftains.

Trump is no pet of the media either, partly for all the promises he made during the campaign, all of them right-wing, most of them empty, and partly because he doesn’t bother to conceal his contempt for the profession.

Again, they probably wouldn’t be making such a big deal out of the president’s Russia links if the president were named Hillary Clinton. Hillary and her hubby-wubby were in cahoots with Putin too, but we don’t read about that every day, do we?

However, apart from similarities between Nixon and Trump, there are also vital differences. For Watergate looks like an innocent prank compared to the sort of crimes Trump and his people might be implicated in.

Yes, Nixon’s people, with his blessing, subverted the electoral process by stealing a nocturnal peek at the Democratic Party headquarters. But at least they were Americans acting on behalf of the US president.

Trump possibly and his staffers definitely might have received tangible help in realising their political ambitions not just from a foreign power, but a hostile one at that. And such a quid had to have a pro quo. Here we might be talking not just dirty tricks but high treason.

Three of Trump’s closest advisers, Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, have had to resign in disgrace. Secretary of State Tillerson and Attorney General Sessions are under a huge cloud – all for the same reason.

So far no criminal charges have been brought but, if I were those gentlemen, I wouldn’t hold my breath. The investigation continues and getting rid of Comey isn’t going to stop it.

Michael Flynn’s case is especially interesting, and he’s likely to be the first one to find himself in the dock. In 2015-2016 Flynn received about $600 million in beautifully laundered Russian cash. Most of it came from the Russian Sviaz’ Bank, acting through Turkish and Dutch intermediaries.

From August, 2015, Flynn was on a salary of $11,250 a month. This came courtesy of various Russian setups, such as the freight company Volga-Dnepr and Kaspersky Laboratory, the latter a widely known FSB front.

The ostensible employers varied, but the sum remained revealingly the same – Putin’s KGB tradecraft let him down there. Thus Flynn received exactly the same amount as a fee for an interview he contributed to a documentary by the Putin propaganda channel RT.

The documentary was never shown and in all likelihood never shot. This was just another conduit for Flynn’s monthly stipend, this time coming from a TV channel specialising in venomous anti-American propaganda.

Gen. Flynn was honoured with a seat next to Putin at the banquet celebrating RT’s tenth anniversary. I’d suggest that for any American to attend such a function would be immoral. For a future National Security Adviser, it was nothing short of treasonous.

Now it’s accepted as a fact that Putin did all he could to ensure Trump’s election. Whether or not his KGB tricks had a decisive effect is open to question. That they were employed is not.

Paradoxically, another man giving Trump a helping hand was Comey, with his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s leaked e-mails. Much of that information came from Putin, and the two men effectively joined forces, if for different reasons.

I’d suggest that, regardless of whether or not Trump is guilty of inappropriate behaviour involving a hostile foreign power, sacking Comey was fundamentally idiotic.

If he was as incompetent as Trump has declared, he should have been fired either before the investigation started or after Trump’s name had been cleared. As it is, Trump looks like a guilty man trying to cover his tracks.

The investigation won’t go away, the incensed media won’t let it. Every step Trump has ever taken on Russian soil will be scrutinised with meticulous attention, every business deal he has had with Putin, every bit of financing he has received, ditto.

Anybody who knows how large-scale business, especially construction, is conducted in Russia will know that no one involved in it can be squeaky clean. Even assuming that Trump isn’t personally guilty of acting in Putin’s interests – and it’s a generous assumption – some dirt is bound to come up to the surface.

All in all, I’d be surprised if Trump serves out his term to the end. One can see the ghost of Richard Nixon floating through the air. Trump himself is aware of the parallel, remembering how Nixon was forced to release compromising tapes.

That’s why he threatened Comey that he had “better hope there are no tapes of our conversations.” What’s he scared of?

The Labour election manifesto is unapologetically Marxist, and in fact its authors don’t apologise for it. Not only do they not bother to conceal they’re Marxists, but they’re openly proud of it.

Most of today’s politicians are crypto-socialists – this is an ineluctable outcome of universal franchise, especially if it isn’t checked by competing forms of government.

The Tories are precisely that: crypto-socialists. They realise that there still exist some residual blocs of voters for whom the word ‘socialist’ leaves an acrid taste in the mouth. They don’t mind socialist policies, as long as they’re called something else.

Our Labourites honestly take the crypto- out of crypto-socialism. Moreover, they go their Tory colleagues one better and publicly praise Marx.

Shadow Chancellor McDonnell said – on the record! – that Britain has “a lot to learn” from Marx. Yet his honesty was outdone by his boss Jeremy Corbyn who combined his respect for the didactic potential of Marxism with accurate self-assessment.

When asked if he too learned his economics from Marx, he concurred with his colleague. “I don’t consider myself the world’s greatest intellectual,” said Jeremy with self-deprecating candour, “but you learn from everybody.”

Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? You don’t really mean ‘everybody’, do you, Jeremy? But then again, one can’t expect a man to use words precisely if he himself admits he’s no great shakes intellectually.

Yet however cretinous these chaps are, they have enough political nous not to say something that’s guaranteed to reduce the number of their party’s seats to single digits. Hence, even if they thought it, they wouldn’t say Britain has a lot to learn from Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot.

But Marx enjoys a benign press in the West. The general consensus is that Marxism is a good idea that was lamentably perverted by the Soviets. The most obvious reason for this on-going acceptance is that for 70 years the most powerful propaganda machine in history brainwashed the world incessantly.

But the real reason lies deeper. For, as any publicity man will tell you, propaganda succeeds only if it appeals to some intuitive cravings already felt. This explains the success of Marxist propaganda: it activates and expiates the least commendable of human emotions, such as envy.

Marxism neither originated when the Soviet Union appeared nor died when it ‘collapsed’. This pernicious doctrine has been so influential not because it lived in Russia, but because it lives in the dark recesses of the human heart.

That’s why people accept Marxism on faith, without ever bothering to read even The Communist Manifesto. In fact, I’m often tempted to have a pocket edition of Marx and Engels with me whenever attending a gathering where such conversations could ensue. For Marxism demonstrably inspires most modern governments.

The nihilist regimes have brought to fruition Marxist dictates on concentration camps (Engels called them “special guarded places”), slavery (Marx: “Slavery is… an economic category of paramount importance”), mass murder (Marx: “the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries”), anti-Semitism (Marx: “…the Polish Jews… this dirtiest of all races,” “Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew”), genocide (Engels: “All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary holocaust”).

The philistine regimes focus on the less carnivorous legacy of Marxism, singling out its economics as a day-to-day textbook, as do the likes of Corbyn and McDonnell. The destruction they perpetrate is therefore delayed-action, but the bomb is ticking away.

In compiling their own manifesto, Comrades Corbyn and McDonnell were clearly inspired by the original document. Hence their proposals to add billions to the already suicidal social spending, repeal the Trade Union Act and introduce greater and stronger unionisation, reintroduce national pay bargaining, tax the ‘rich’ even more and so forth.

And of course they refuse to make “false promises” on immigration, meaning they won’t limit it in any way. That’s another lesson they learned from Marx who taught that “the workers have no motherland”.

“Abolition of all rights to inheritance” is another dictate from the Manifesto. This worthy goal is very much on the agenda, but it’s hard to achieve all at once without ‘revolutionary terror’, so beloved of Marx. In its absence, the lower-case manifesto promises to lower the threshold of inheritance tax.

Now the experience of every country where such policies have been tried shows that their net effect on public finances is negative. But our visceral Marxists prove that sound reason need not apply where evil emotions are at work.

They’re driven by Marxist envy and resulting hatred, not by accountancy. Their aim is not to cushion failure but to punish success. If this destroys the economy, then so be it. For it’s destruction and not creation that every Marxist sees in his mind’s eye.

Our brainwashed populace is too timid to protest against Marxist prescriptions, such as “a heavy progressive and graduated income tax”.

Yet this abomination violates the most fundamental principle of our polity: equality before the law. Those who make more money obviously must pay a greater amount in tax. However, making them pay up to five times the proportion of their income is unjust, not to speak of economically counterproductive.

Yet our most sacred tenets have no chance when assailed by Marxist envy. The situation would perhaps be slightly better if people actually read Marx. But it wouldn’t be much better: the poison of Marxism has seeped into the bloodstream of the West, and nothing short of a complete transfusion can cure it.

Thanks to people like Corbyn and McDonnell, Marxism lives – so the West may die.

“Russia,” said Alexander III, “has only two allies: her army and navy”.

That hermeticism was very much on display yesterday in Red Square, where the Russians were celebrating their single-handed victory over Hitler.

As columns of soldiers and tanks marched by, standing next to my friend Vlad were heads of other states and governments. How many? Well, in round numbers… one. The president of Moldova, a country wholly on Vlad’s payroll.

(The planned fly-past by the air force was cancelled due to bad weather. At least back in the good old days the Soviets knew how to disperse clouds to make sure it never rained on their parades.)

Demonstrably missing were leaders of Soviet allies in the war Russia won single-handedly. And if you wish to contest this take on recent history, you obviously haven’t been following the Russian press.

The papers and TV stations explain to the Russians in simple words even they can understand that neither Britain nor other Commonwealth countries nor the USA nor, well, anybody, had the tiniest hand in the victory. It was all Russia – not even the Soviet Union, as yesterday’s irrefutable truth went.

Londoners dying in 1940 under Luftwaffe bombs made in the USSR had nothing to do with the war. Neither did the British and US troops fighting in Africa, Asia and later in Europe.

Neither did the French, mocked by the Russians over their collapse in 40 days – even though the French downed more Nazi planes than did the Soviets in the first 40 days of their war. The Nazis also advanced through France at a much slower pace than they did through Russia in June-July, 1941.

Ask almost any Russian when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, and he’ll tell you she didn’t. Russia took part in a different war, the Great Patriotic one that began on 22 June, 1941, and ended on 9 May, 1945 – a day after the Second World War ended.

This is the sort of malodorous fare the Soviets were fed before the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’, when there was no Internet and when listening to Western radio stations was a crime punishable by concentration camps. It’s astounding that even today, when anyone with a computer on his desk can find out the truth, the Russians still eagerly gobble up the same slops.

It’s good to know that even young Westerners refuse to choke on that fodder. Yesterday an RT reporter was assailing people in Paris streets, asking if they’re thankful to Russia for defeating Hitler and thereby liberating France.

“France,” replied one youngster, “was liberated by US troops with the help of the French Resistance. The fight between Hitler and Stalin was one between two fascists.”

While quibbling about the exact political nomenclature, one has to congratulate the French student: he knows history much better than most Russians.

The Second World War began on 1 September, 1939, eight days after the Nazis and the Soviets signed a criminal pact dividing Europe between them. The Nazis attacked Poland from the west, and 17 days later the Soviets attacked her from the east.

Without that alliance Germany wouldn’t have been able to conquer Europe, nor conceivably even Poland. Having caught their breath after the original shock, the Polish Army Group Poznan, still possessing 1,000 tanks, regrouped to the east of the Vistula, and the Nazi offensive was running out of steam.

The Germans were short of essential ordnance, such as aircraft bombs and heavy artillery shells. The outcome of the war was far from certain – until the Soviets stuck a knife into Poland’s back.

Yet according to Soviet and Putin’s propaganda only the German and Polish soldiers who died during those three weeks were killed in the Second World War. The 3,000 Soviet casualties weren’t. The USSR didn’t start fighting until 22 June, 1941, remember?

The Soviets then proceeded to occupy, bloodlessly, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and parts of Romania, including one that hadn’t been mentioned in the Soviet-Nazi Pact. Their attempted conquest of Finland in the winter of 1940-1941 was far from bloodless: half a million Soviet soldiers died fighting against a tiny country that had just a few outdated tanks, and practically no navy or air force.

Yet they didn’t die in the war – the war, as you recall, hadn’t yet begun. An exchange of prisoners followed that non-war, with the Finns delivering 10,000 emaciated, frost-bitten Russians to the Soviets. They were immediately taken to a polar concentration camp and shot to a man – but the war hadn’t yet started.

It started on 22 June, 1941, when Hitler delivered his preemptive strike, realising that was his only chance to beat Stalin to the punch. Modern historians show that Hitler acted in the nick of time: Stalin’s military juggernaut was ready to roll a week later, no more than two.

Even that wasn’t a Great Patriotic War, at least not just that. For unfolding in parallel was a civil war waged by Soviet slaves against their slave master. Before the end of 1941 the Germans took 4.5 million Soviet POWs, of whom about a third took up arms against the Soviet Union – a pandemic outbreak of treason without parallels not only in Russian but in world history.

Also, Ukrainians, Balts, Caucasians and other denizens of the non-Russian parts of the USSR were eagerly joining Waffen SS and other Nazi formations, showing little gratitude for all the Russians had done for them. (For details, Google Holodomor, Russian genocide by famine in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan.)

The obscene rite in Red Square celebrated a calamity for which the USSR was as responsible as Nazi Germany – a calamity above all for the Russians themselves. According to recently declassified archives, the country lost 41 million souls in that war, a demographic catastrophe from which she still hasn’t recovered.

Almost half of them were civilian losses, while the military casualties included at least half a million Soviet soldiers executed by their own side. Over 157,000 were condemned by military tribunals – probably twice as many were just shot without even that travesty of justice.

Russia wasn’t an innocent victim in that murderous war: she was one of the murderers, as culpable as the Nazis but much more successful. Largely thanks to the help of those countries who, according to Russian mythology, took no part in the war, the Soviets got to rule almost half of the world.

They no longer do so, having lost thereby their raison d’être. Hence the war and Russia’s ‘single-handed victory’ have been turned into a religion, or rather a gruesome pagan Walpurgisnacht.

 BMWs and Mercedes sporting incendiary bumper stickers saying “We’ll do it again if we have to” and “To Berlin!” are inundating Moscow streets. Starbuck outlets are doling out replicas of the side caps worn by the Soviets during their triumph of 70-odd years ago.

And Vlad, haltingly reading from a crib, is bragging that “there is no, there was no, and there will be no force that can conquer our people… the armed forces of Russia are capable of warding off any potential aggression.”

I’ve got news for Vlad: no one wants to attack Russia. I realise that mouthing that paranoid gibberish is something he has to do to assuage the possible unrest among his half-starving people, which is why he also has to talk about learning “the lessons of the war”.

There’s only one lesson: Russia herself is to blame for the unparalleled losses she suffered in that war. Rather than being proud about losing 41 million in a war Stalin started together with Hitler, the Russians ought to remind themselves what happens when they pounce like rabid dogs on anyone within reach of their fangs.

Or perhaps the Russians can look forward to another successful conquest. After all, they have a powerful ally in their corner: Moldova.

Chesterton described Thomas Hardy’s work as “The village atheist talking to the village idiot.” Stephen Fry, a comedian, author, left-wing activist, and CELEBRITY, proves that the two personages can co-exist in the same breast.

He’s not the only one. Even men considerably brighter than Fry begin to sound idiotic the moment they spout arguments, never mind diatribes, against God. It’s as if God punishes aggressive atheists by turning their minds to ordure.

Fry’s diatribe came on Irish TV, where he was asked what he’d say if confronted by God. The poor chap got excited and began to sputter spittle:

“How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?… Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?”

It’s worth mentioning that Fry has largely built his public persona by purveying two assumptions: 1) that his manic depression makes him interesting and 2) his facile cleverness propped up by a good memory for quiz trivia makes him not just a CELEBRITY but also a THINKER.

That the two canards are readily swallowed by the public says more about our time than about Fry, who’s entitled to make a living as best he knows. But he ought to control his girlish emotiveness if he expects to be taken seriously by people a notch above his TV audiences.

Irish police are currently investigating Fry for blasphemy under the Defamation Act. If tried and convicted, he could be sentenced to a €25,000 fine, a derisory sum for a CELEBRITY.

But another charge, that of stupidity, has already been filed. Fry has been tried and convicted on the evidence of the above hysterical harangue.

Intelligent atheists – and this description approaches an oxymoron – know that trying to argue the toss will make them sound silly. That’s why they tend to hedge their bets by claiming to be agnostics, rather than atheists.

We just don’t know, they say. Neither the existence nor nonexistence of God can be proved, so it’s best not to talk about it. Naturally to this lot ‘proved’ means empirically proved: atheists can’t accept the existence of any other than empirical knowledge.

That by itself is a puny, not to mention self-refuting, position: denied thereby is the possibility of any knowledge obtained not only by grace or intuition but even by rationalisation, which is the tool they claim to be using. If empirical knowledge is the be all and end all of cognition, then not only philosophy but even natural science is impossible. Most great discoveries have been made not by rationalisation but by the post-rationalisation of intuitive knowledge.

But at least such men shy away from illogical attacks on God, who according to them doesn’t exist. Thus they prove that, though somewhat wanting in the area of high intelligence, they aren’t devoid of common sense.

Fry has neither. If he had some of the latter, he’d have answered the interviewer’s question by saying that he couldn’t possibly say anything to God because God doesn’t exist.

A theologian, incidentally, would agree: God indeed doesn’t exist, in the usual sense of the word. It’s because of God that everything exists. However, since TV hacks aren’t known for their command of philosophical subtleties, the reply Fry didn’t proffer would have ended the subject: “Next question, Stephen. How’s your husband these days?”

That way Fry would have stayed in his own world, one inhabited by CELEBRITIES and other luvvies. However, by implicitly accepting that God, however awful he might be, does exist, he entered a different world, one with its own philosophical system, language and corpus of knowledge.

In that world even an average theology student would be able to tear Fry’s hysterical harangue to shreds by arguing from basic theodicy.

He’d explain to Fry the concept of original sin corrupting both man and the natural world. He might even quote Russia’s first philosopher Pyotr Chaadayev, who said: “Our concern should be not combatting natural disasters but trying not to deserve them.”

The youngster could also point out that God is outside time and space, and therefore outside man’s notions of what is or isn’t just. A higher system can know all about a lower one, but not the other way around. Hence it’s not only possible but certain that divine justice differs from the human version.

If Fry chooses to operate within the world into which he barged without wiping dung off his shoe soles, he should accept the concept of life eternal, within which life in earth is but a passing instant. In earth, dying of bone cancer at 10 is more tragic than doing so at 90, but compared to eternity the difference isn’t just small but nonexistent.

It’s also worth mentioning that a man with artistic pretensions is singularly unobservant if all he sees in the world is misery, evil and cancerous children. God not only created man but continues to delight him with endless variety of flora and fauna, melancholy rivers and rowdy seas teeming with fish, craggy mountains, wild forests and gentle hills alive with birds and beasts.

My advice to Fry is to shut up on such subjects and stick to milking his bipolar disorder and homoactivism for what they’re worth. He’d still sound no less pathetic but considerably less stupid. And Stephen? Take on Mohammed next, see how you get on. You won’t get away with a fine, I can tell you that.

My French friends must be happy that for the next few years the Palais de l’Élysée will be inhabited by both a perpetrator and a victim of statutory rape.

The criminal is Brigitte Trogneux, who 24 years ago seduced her pupil Manny Macron. According to modern ethos, this was supposed to traumatise the poor boy for life. It was also supposed to put the offender behind bars or at least have her struck off for life.

Now speaking from personal experience, or rather lack thereof, I doubt I would have felt traumatised if one of my better-looking female teachers had seduced me at 15. I know that none of my subsequent experiences, modest as they were, left an indelible scar.

In Manny’s case, such a traumatic experience would have been even less likely because, as one hears, he’s otherwise inclined anyway. Oh well, as that Brooklyn woman said, “Oedipus, schmedipus, as long he loves his Mum…”

Still, there are legal aspects to consider here, mutatis mutandis. Yes, the age of consent in France is 15, which is truer to life than our own puritanical 16, but rather more restrictive than Estonia’s 14 (I wonder if my travel agent has good deals on London-Tallinn airfares).

So Brigitte wouldn’t have been culpable on those grounds, but even naughty France frowns on 40-year-old teachers seducing 15-year-old pupils over whom they have authority. Too bad that France has copied the US in having statutes of limitations in its laws.

Yet I’m happy to see that, even if Manny found the original experience traumatic, he has then parlayed it into a rather successful political career. The statutory rapist is now ensconced at the presidential palace, and she’s even getting an unpaid job in the government.

I’m not certain what her title will be. Minister for plastic surgery in charge of oedipal affairs? Whatever it is, I’m sure Brigitte will handle it with élan – she strikes me as that kind of girl.

If you detect a note of frivolity in my treatment of this momentous event in French history, you’re right. It’s that rotten habit I have of relying on levity when gravity is impossible.

If you can find anything serious to say about the bone-crushing nonentity that’s Manny Macron, by all means enlighten me. If you can’t – and I’m sure you won’t be able to – then you must agree that the only qualification Manny has for presiding over one of the world’s most significant states isn’t what he is but what he isn’t: Marine Le Pen.

Modern politics just about everywhere, not just in France, has become a secular answer to apophatic theology. People justify their vote in purely negative terms; they vote not for but against.

I can’t for the life of me see how anybody, with the possible exception of Brigitte, can be enthusiastic about Manny qua Manny. He mouths platitudes on every subject under the sun without even realising that some of them – well, most – are mutually exclusive.

He talks about free trade while professing undying devotion to the EU, which, as a protectionist bloc, is the exact opposite of free trade. He talks about loving France and then screams his banalities to the accompaniment of the EU anthem and against the backdrop of the EU stars.

(It’s telling that the EU chose one of Beethoven’s few awful pieces, the last movement of his Ninth Symphony, as its anthem, and one of Europe’s few ugly capitals, Brussels, as its own.)

He mouths utter gibberish about Britain having imposed ‘liberal values’ on the EU, to which Europe can now say good riddance with a sigh of relief – while reaffirming his commitment to those same liberal values that in actual fact haven’t been imposed on the EU by Britain or anyone else.

Manny is a typical internationalist socialist apparatchik, who first pretended he was a socialist and then pretended he wasn’t. There’s really nothing one can say about him that hasn’t already been said about our own Tony Blair – another jumped-up nonentity committed to self-aggrandisement via supra-national politics. And Manny doesn’t even have Tony’s gift of the gab, such as it is.

What is worth talking about seriously is the huge disappointment experienced by our own Ukip types at the defeat of Putin’s inept employee Marine Le Pen.

Yes, she dislikes the EU, but then so does Putin – and so does every fascist party in Europe. But Le Pen’s economics is pure Trotsky – and everything else is pure Mussolini. So how does one make a choice between a mindless EU apparatchik and a mindless national socialist? This is your clear-cut case of apophatic politics: voting not for but against.

Seeing the world through the prism of that one issue is exactly what killed Ukip, which should remind us of the moral and intellectual paucity of single-issue politics. I despise it even when I happen to agree with the single issue, as I do in this case.

I detest the EU as much as does any fully paid-up member of Ukip – possibly even more because my objections to it are not just parochially patriotic but generally moral. I’ve lived under a regime totally based on lies, and I know the pitfalls involved.

But the regime I’ve lived under was also fascist, in the broad sense of the word, and I’m aware of those pitfalls too. It’s a matter of choosing the pitfall into which to stumble.

Given that choice, I’d rather spend half of my time in a sovereign Britain with the toxic EU dust shaken off her feet. But I’d rather spend the other half (as I do now) in a France enthralled in the evil I know, a tyrannical, utterly corrupt, mendacious EU, than in a France reeling under a fascist despotism I don’t know, but know everything about.

Add to this another dimension, that of Putin calling in his chits if Le Pen had won the election, and Manny, despicable zero that he is, and married to his surgically modified surrogate mother, becomes the lesser evil – an evil though he undoubtedly is nonetheless.

A couple of years ago, a stand-up comedian cracked a joke about the royal family celebrating the Queen’s birthday. “It was a small affair,” he said. “Just the close family – and Harry.”

The joke was rewarded with uproarious laughter because the audience was familiar with the persistent rumour that Prince Harry was sired by his mother’s lover, Capt. James Hewitt.

Now, according to The Times, “this outrageous and discredited insinuation” will resurface in King Charles III, a BBC drama to be shown on Wednesday.

Apparently Harry’s love interest asks him: “Is Charles really your dad? Or was it the other one?” Now considering the pervasive nature of the rumour that just won’t die, the question is plausible if tactless and probably groundless.

Yet the very fact that it’ll be asked has caused an uproar from all sorts of predictable quarters fronted by Rosa Monckton. I don’t know what Miss Monckton’s CV actually says, but I know what it should say: Professional Friend and Closest Confidante of Diana.

I’m sure she must possess other qualifications as well, but much of her popular appeal comes from acting as a self-appointed guardian of Diana’s reputation and legacy, such as they are.

Donning that hat yet again, Miss Monckton said: “The BBC is deliberately causing pain to a real living person in a salacious fashion. The fact is this is not a harmless myth – these people are still alive.”

On her own touchy-feely terms she’s doubtless right. Prince Harry won’t enjoy watching that “insinuation” come back to life, “outrageous and discredited” as it may be. After all, this young man is endowed with extrovert hypersensitivity, as he doesn’t mind showing to all and sundry in the very same media.

Now I for one am ready to accept the evidence that Prince Harry was born before his mother two-timed his father, the eponymous King Charles III to be – especially since Hewitt himself says the same thing. Harry does look like Hewitt, but that’s no proof of paternity. Neither is Harry’s ginger hair, as anyone who has seen Diana’s red-headed brother Lord Spencer can confirm.

Still, it’s possible that Hewitt et al. are lying to protect her sacred memory and especially the reputation of the royal family – I doubt we’ll ever know or care to know the indisputable truth.

Yet the criticism levelled at the BBC is fully justified on both specific and general grounds. For the BBC makes it its daily business to violate the Charter it must obey to qualify for public money. The first three items specified therein demand “sustaining citizenship and civil society, promoting education and learning, stimulating creativity and cultural excellence.”

If the BBC ever does any of these things, it’s only by accident. Most of the time it runs tawdry entertainment (which I’m sure King Charles III will be) or else vents its left-wing bias through pseudo-serious programmes pitched at an intellectual level between mental vacuity and retardation.

Having said all that, Miss Monckton, or for that matter Prince Harry, shouldn’t get too worked up about this. For Diana only has herself to blame, posthumously as it may be. She herself besmirched her reputation by embarking on multiple affairs, of which the one with Hewitt was the most publicised but neither the first nor the last.

This was accompanied by expert manipulation of the media, culminating in that notorious BBC interview in which Diana flapped her eyelashes histrionically and admitted with girlish gasps that she “adored him”.

Now, even if the mauvaises langues cast aspersion on Harry’s paternal descent, his maternal lineage is in no doubt: he has inherited his mother’s vulgar tendency to wear her sensitive heart on her sleeve, unaware that this sartorial habit may cake that organ in grime.

He and his brother would do better choosing their paternal grandparents for role models. They’d then learn how to discharge their duties with reticent and selfless dignity, serving the public rather than acting out their own – and their mother’s – notions of emotional incontinence.

Both Diana and her paramour got off lightly, for both committed not just a marital indiscretion but a state crime. Specifically, they violated the Treason Act of 1351 that’s still in force today.

According to the Act, adultery with the wife of the king or heir to the throne is high treason punishable by death. At the time Diana played the beast with two backs with Hewitt, high treason was the only crime calling for the capital punishment, although that has since been replaced by life imprisonment.

The Act is ambivalent on whether or not the wife herself is equally guilty, but any clever barrister would doubtless cite precedents, such as Anne Boleyn, who lost her pretty head by supposedly having been unfaithful to Henry VIII.

Such touchiness in this matter is natural, for the wife’s hanky-panky outside the royal bed may raise doubts about succession, which can be deadly to the whole dynasty. This, to me, is a more interesting angle from which to examine Diana’s amorous record.

It’s also a good reason for Miss Monckton and other Diana hagiographers to moderate their indignation at the BBC’s lèse–majesté. People may accuse them of sharing their heroine’s talent for disingenuous manipulation.

When Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world, he must have anticipated the need to keep our Anglican hierarchy a safe distance away from this world.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have issued a letter, guiding 16,000 parishes to the right electoral choices. Since the letter doesn’t say what such choices would be, parishioners must be perplexed.

The letter manifestly lacks evangelical absolutism. It’s like tagging the phrase ‘on the other hand…’ to each of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not steal, but on the other hand…”

Their Graces start by exhorting Christians to live according to Christian principles. This is unassailable, but then truisms always are – that’s why they are truisms. The difficulty arises when Christian principles are related to political realities.

Theology is ‘the queen of all sciences’ because it reigns supreme in making intellectual demands on its practitioners. Only the deepest and subtlest of minds can grasp theological intricacies – and put political, economic and social realities on a theological footing.

I hope no one will take umbrage if I suggest that Justin Welby and John Sentamu aren’t in the upper tier of the world’s thinkers. In fact, if this letter is anything to go by, they’re closer to the basement.

Their Graces stress the importance of “urgent and serious solutions to our housing challenges”, flag the need for a “confident and flourishing health service” and decry “the exclusion of the poorest groups from future economic life”.

On the other hand, they warn that “there are dangers of an economy over-reliant on debt”. Really? And I thought Christ was in favour of borrowing: “Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.”

Then again, Jesus wasn’t laying down responsible fiscal principles for our Chancellor. In this world one wonders how Their Graces propose to reconcile the huge increase in public spending they seem to have in mind with reducing reliance on debt.

For a huge increase in government spending is exactly what it would take to meet “our housing challenges”, make our pathetic health service “confident and flourishing” and include “the poorest groups” into “future economic life”.

Where’s the money going to come from? Especially since Their Graces praise the pledge by the Conservatives and Labour to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid? It’s that sacramental phrase ‘on the other hand’ that’s implied here.

The issue of immigration also has two hands in the episcopal body of thought. On the one hand, we must extend “a generous and hospitable welcome to refugees and migrants”. But on the other hand, “We should not be deaf to the legitimate concerns that have been expressed about the scale of population flows.”

So which is it? Listening to ‘the legitimate concerns’ or extending ‘a generous and hospitable welcome’? Since ‘the legitimate concerns’ centre around keeping outsiders out or at least down to a bare minimum, the two are mutually exclusive.

Anyway, which party is more likely to uphold the virtues extolled by Their Graces, provided we understand what they are? Oh well, these “are not the preserve of any one political party”.

Now I’m really confused. Labour is a party of cosmic indebtedness (as opposed to the merely stratospheric kind favoured by the Tories). Moreover, when in government, it demonstrated its inability to solve our housing problems, sort out the NHS or include the poor into economic life in any other than a freeloading capacity. On the contrary, they made all those problems far worse.

They’re sound on generosity and hospitality to migrants, but not on listening to the legitimate concerns about this generosity tearing our social fabric to tatters. I’d say that leaves the Tories in the driving seat by the process of elimination.

Their Graces then broach the subject of foreign trade, which ought to be “effective and just”. Meaning what exactly, other than another vapid bien pensant generality? Britain, they say, must remain an “outward looking and generous country”. It’s that G-spot again. Does this mean that we should continue to give money to the EU? Or do foreign trade at a loss? Or turn foreign trade into foreign aid?

Then they talk about “historic failures” of our educational system, which Their Graces ascribe to overemphasising academic subjects. Here we’ve left the area of meaningless circumlocution to enter one of ignorance and fatuity.

Some 80 per cent of our school leavers have problems reading, writing and adding up. Against that backdrop it’s sheer lunacy to talk about our schools being too academic. “Historic failures” have been caused by turning schools into social engineering labs, which project was animated by exactly the socialist ideology Their Graces really espouse.

What else? Oh yes, “the greatest burdens of austerity have not been borne by those with the broadest shoulders”, and it’s all Mrs Thatcher’s fault.

This is leftie waffle at its most soaring. Austerity means cutting government spending, not slowing the tempo of its growth from suicidal to merely promiscuous. Since public spending has been steadily growing, talking about austerity is simply ignorant. And yes, when public spending grows more slowly, recipients of government largesse will notice the change more than those who pay their own way.

There’s a hint at wealth redistribution here, but again Their Graces don’t come out and say it. By the same token they only talk about “re-examining” the Trident deterrent, when what they really favour is unilateral disarmament.

It’s only inadvertently that they said something that rings true. The election, according to Their Graces, is an opportunity to “…reimagine our shared values as a country”.

What’s only imagined (or ‘reimagined) isn’t real. Their Graces live in an imaginary world governed by imaginary, not real, ‘values’. Hence they’re outside the reality of both the United Kingdom — and that other one that is not of this world.

Vlad dislikes the EU, which is good. Alas, he dislikes it only because he wrongly thinks it epitomises the West, which he hates. That’s not so good.

You see, Vlad isn’t just a career KGB officer but a visceral one. The KGB has been encoded into his DNA, which is why he shares all the foibles of that sinister organisation. He’s capable of perfidy, but not of subtlety. Cleverness, but not depth. Tactics, but not strategy.

His tendency is to rely on the more primitive tricks from the KGB bag: ‘whacking in the shithouse’ (to use his inaugural phrase), bribery, honey trap, blackmail.

At times he gets so carried away with such expedients that he loses sight of the desired goal, running the risk of the means not so much justifying the end as sabotaging it.

Vlad has taken Russia out of a short siding and put her back on the imperial track, which she has ridden for 500 years or so. Yet the mysterious Russian soul is such that the Russians seldom pursue imperial ambitions for material gain. Expansion is usually their aim in itself, and in pursuit of it they’re prepared to let their self-interest suffer.

Putin has found a way of exploiting this craving on the part of the populace, but at a cost. Moscow is full of posters and bumper stickers saying “To Berlin!”, “We can do it again!” and some such. Some of these also feature portraits of Stalin, who’s now almost as popular as he was in his lifetime.

The KGB junta is expertly whipping such grassroots sentiments into a hysteria, hoping this will make people forget that their standard of living is in the Chad and Gambia territory, while their human rights occupy an even lower plateau and their press is less free than in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Venezuela (Reporters Without Borders rating).

The downside is that an openly hostile stance towards the West may shake it out of its normal torpor. There are signs already that the West is losing, albeit slowly, some of its demob happiness. Military budgets are growing at a snail’s pace, if at all, but at least Russia is now generally identified as a hostile power.

Vlad could change all that, but his KGB viscera won’t let him. For example, if he saw the EU for what it is, a nail in the coffin of Western polity, he’d portray himself as its friend rather than implacable enemy.

Perhaps he could even ingratiate Russia into EU membership and then slowly take over by subverting that wicked organisation from within. As the only virile military power in Europe, Russia could then make the entire EU work for her, the way it now works for Germany.

Instead, KGB Vlad does what comes naturally: provocation, blackmail, disinformation, sabotage, cultivation of extremist parties – all bound to kill the dairy cow he could instead profitably milk.

Witness his current meddling in French elections. Le Pen’s National Front isn’t so much Putin’s client as his employee – it’s on Putin’s payroll. Hence he has thrown his KGB knowhow behind Marine, knowing that her victory would enable him to recoup his investment with a huge interest.

Not being an expert in clandestine tradecraft, I wouldn’t presume to offer Vlad any advice. But it’s reasonably clear that his own undoubted expertise has backfired by making Marine come across as the vicious demagogue she really is.

Every molecule in Vlad’s KGB body says that dripping some dirt on Macron into the public domain will give Marine a leg up. And then who knows, she might win and gratefully act as Vlad’s battering ram bringing the EU down.

To that end Russian heirs to the KGB First Chief Directorate expertly spread rumours that Macron evades taxes by hiding money in an offshore account. Realising that she was losing the presidential TV debate, Marine alluded to the rumours – only to get herself sued for her trouble.

I’ve followed numerous televised debates in various countries, but I’ve never seen one candidate suing another for libel. Macron would never have done that if he were unsure of the outcome: he knows that Le Pen’s KGB sponsors won’t be able to come up with any prima facie evidence.

So far Marine hasn’t referred to the other rumour also spread by the FSB, one referring to Macron’s ambivalent sexuality. Unlike the accusation of financial impropriety, this one has been around for a while and it’s probably less groundless.

Some of my French friends have inside knowledge of their country’s politics, and for them Macron’s bisexuality is hardly a secret. His close friendship with the male head of Radio France is also widely known.

Manny’s denials would sound more convincing if he stopped wearing two wedding rings and in general were less blatant about it. That he doesn’t go out of his way to conceal his predilection shows that he doesn’t regard any possible revelations as unduly damaging. Basically, no one in France gives a damn.

My friends, who despise Macron but detest Le Pen, fear that the Russians may at the last moment produce some photographs that could scupper Manny’s bid, but those photos would have to be truly disgusting to impress the blasé French.

I for one would love to see Vlad wearing a long mac and whispering “Hey, handsome, wanna see some feelthy pictures?”, which is roughly his natural level. But meanwhile he has reinforced his growing reputation as a geopolitical saboteur of legitimate politics.

Many Westerners are aghast, and their governments are beginning to take heed. What they’re going to do about it remains to be seen. But before long they’ll have to do something to neutralise the growing Russian threat. Vlad is bound to learn sooner or later that KGB tradecraft isn’t quite the same as statecraft.